TIME OUT OF MIND: A TIMELINE OF
THE COUNTERCULTURE -
This is my own copy, updated, of my counterculture timeline that
I donated to be put on the WELL gopher from about 1993 to 2005.
This was the first sixties timeline on the web, and was created because
in
1993 I could not find any other. Bravo to all that have come after.
May a million flowers bloom.
Last major update Oct 2005 - Feb 2006.
Mayan Sacred Calendar correspondences added August 2008.
~ Judith Goldsmith
________________________________________

A BABY BOOMER'S CHRONOLOGY OF MODERN TIMES;
A HIPPIE HISTORY OF THE SIXTIES

A NOTE TO STUDENTS: IT
IS UNWISE TO USE ANY DATES IN THESE TIMELINES
IN ANY OTHER MATERIAL WITHOUT COROBORATING THEM THROUGH OTHER SOURCES;
ATLASES AND DATEBOOKS AND OTHER OFFICIAL SOURCES HAVE FACT-CHECKERS
EMPLOYED TO DO THIS; I HAVE ONLY ME, AND WHAT I HAVE TIME FOR.
THESE TIMELINES ARE NOT "DOCUMENTS OF RECORD" AND CERTAINLY
HAVE INCORRECT INFORMATION, AND DUPLICATING THAT INFORMATION
WITHOUT CHECKING IS JUST SPREADING POSSIBLE MIS-INFORMATION MORE WIDELY.

Students: if studying cultures and societies interests you,
you might consider a sociology degree,
such as offered here.

On
these pages, you will find a work-in-progress which is a timeline of significant
events for baby boomers, bohemians, beatnicks, and hippies, focusing especially
on the sixties. "Significant" so far means it was significant to me, when
I was a sixties hippie, and my hippie friends. I started putting together
this timeline because I was trying to write about the sixties, and I had
to remind myself of what happened when. Then I kept going on into the seventies
and eighties, following the reverberations from the sixties, which I believe
are still happening. Then I got interested in how things started and went
back and read about the history of Bohemia, and all those dates are now
included. My reading of all this led to some delightful insights on how
themes echo through the ages.

When I was in high school in the 1960s, no one would
talk about World War I and World War II and the years that led up to them
and between them, and what followed. I eagerly read what it said in my tenth
grade history book, because we completely skipped over it in class. I wondered
why we didn't get taught about it. Was it too controversial or too unpleasant?
But how were we supposed to know how things had come to be the way they
were in our own lifetimes? Then I realized that those older than me did
not think of these times as history because they themselves had lived through
them.

It's sad how little the counterculture knows of its
own history. Saul Landau bemoans the fact that, while in Europe students
learn the history of recent struggles from those who lived through them,
in the U.S. every new freshman college class, for instance, has no idea
how recently the liberties it enjoys - co-ed living, free speech, and to
be politically active, etc. - were won, and what it took to accomplish this.

The timeline has gaps, and details I have not yet fully checked out. I'm sure
it has all kinds of personal biases, including being biased much more
to the U.S. and to the white middle-class than it should be. (Note: the terms "negro" and "Indian" have
been used until the date when substitutes for these terms were proposed.)

I hereby copyright this work,
in case I ever find a publisher for it. But you may download it, copy
it, and GIVE it to friends, as long as no money is ever exchanged for
it. Like Bruce Sterling says, you don't own it, it's just passing through
you.

_______________________________________________________________________________________
NOTES ON THE CONSTRUCTION OF THE COUNTERCULTURE TIMELINE:
The generational notings in this timeline explore the possibility that generational
changes follow major events that change attitudes (i.e. those born after the
French revolution never experienced the situation that led to that revolution,
but instead were born into a more hopeful time, with possibilities only dreamed
of by their elders, and so had quite different attitudes about the possibilities of life) and how members of
that new generation act as they enter their twenties, usually the first
time they could have, indeed were called upon, to be actively engaged in their
times. More information on "Generations" theory: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Generations_(book)

At the age of eighty, in 1823, the fiftieth anniversary of the Declaration [of
Independence], Jefferson wrote to Adams: "The generation which commences
a revolution can rarely complete it. Habituated from their infancy to passive
submission of body and mind to their kings and priests, they are not qualified,
when called on, to think and provide for themselves and their experience, their
ignorance and bigotry make them instruments often . . . to defeat their own
. . . purposes." - Michael Ventura: Shadow Dancing in the U.S.A. (1985)

I am always delighted every time a young person shakes their head in disbelief about how
poorly previous generations treated the earth. It has become a given that the earth must be cared for,
something that could never have been different. I spent ten years heavily involved
in environmental politics, and we won. Now it's just working out the details,
as awesome as that task might be. And not a moment too soon.

_______________________________________________________________________________________ Michael Ventura on the Sixties (Shadow Dancing in the U.S.A., 1985): You tend to forget just how much raw energy was loose in the air then, and
you don't quite believe your own memory: that sometimes, then, for weeks on
end, we actually thought (1) that we were living in the Promised Land, the New
Age, the Other World, (2) that it was everything we had ever imagined it could
be, and (3) that everyone was going to join us in its promise as soon as they
saw how good it was. There was, hovering over everything, a possibility larger
than the tedious makeshift that had been called "daily life." Simply to be alive
then, to be part of the demographic bulge called the war babies, meant that
somewhere people more
or less your age, people who might conceivably welcome you in their effort,
whom you might even run into on the street (which often happened!), were trying
whatever fool idea, passionate thought or cosmic vision they thought themselves
capable of. You yourself could be doing nothing about such things for the moment,
and maybe you never had and never would, yet through some alchemy of the time
somehow you were part of their hope and they were part of yours.

The Sioux once sent young warriors to the mountains alone, and they were not
to come back until they'd dreamed their names. They were protected by the instruction
they'd received in how to survive and in how to interpret dreams. We had mostly
had instruction in how to be like everyone else, only more successful, and in
how dreams were not important. So when, as an entire generation, we made everywhere
we went a mountain on which we were trying to dream our names - we were messy,
out of hand, easily distracted, out of our depth, full of shit, half-assed,
and in deep trouble. But all that sound and all that fury, all that silliness
and all those trips imprinted on everyone who was there and on everyone who
came after the notion that humankind has far more dimensions than had been admitted
for a very long time. It is a simple and utterly disruptive notion. Some people
have been trying to live it out and a lot of people have been trying to forget
it ever since. Because once you admit it - once you
admit it - nothing
is quite the same.